Struggles for the Public Interest: Organized Labor and State Mediation in Postwar America

In his 1906 Annual Message to Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt urged support for a bill to mandate the government investigation of labor disputes before allowing workers to strike. In an “age of great corporate and labor combinations,” the president insisted “the public has itself an interest which can not wisely be disregarded; an interest not merely of general convenience, for the question of a just and proper public policy must also be considered.” Congress at the time was unmoved. Yet Roosevelt's proposal signaled a growing movement to compel the investigation and arbitration of major labor conflicts. This movement peaked in the years soon after World War I. Advocates for government mediation insisted that an impartial commission of experts could peacefully negotiate workplace disputes and spare the consuming public the contests of will and force associated with major strikes. The Progressive Era arbitration of railroad and mining conflicts established important precedents and have received significant attention from scholars. National mediation boards, however, rarely assumed the power to order participation. Such efforts were more prominent at die state level. In 1915 Colorado legislators largely implemented Roosevelt's proposal, creating the first government board with powers to ban strikes and lockouts pending an investigation in industries affected with a public interest. Soon after the war, Kansas expanded upon the Colorado precedent with a compulsory arbitration board to regulate a host of indus-tries deemed essential to the public. Programs for state mediation of labor conflicts in the postwar period were particularly bound up with questions of compulsion in the public interest.